Lost and Hostile Gospels

Christianity, as the religion of the Incarnation, has its external form and its internal spirit, and it is impossible to dissociate one from the other without peril. Mere formalism and naked spirituality are alike and equally pernicious. Formalism, the resolution of religion into ceremonial acts only, void of spirit, is like the octopus, lacing its thousand filaments about the soul and drawing it into the abyss; and mysticism, pure spirituality, like the magnet mountain in Sinbad's voyage, draws the nails out of the vessel – the rivets of moral law – and the Christian character goes to pieces.

The history of the Church is the history of her leaning first towards one side, then towards the other, of advance amid perpetual recoils from either peril.

2. The alarm caused in Jerusalem amidst the elder apostles and the Nazarene Church at the immorality which disfigured Pauline Christianity, was not the only cause of the mistrust wherewith they viewed him and his teaching. Other causes existed which I have not touched on in my text, lest I should distract attention from the main points of my argument, but they are deserving of notice here.

And the first of these was the intense prejudice which existed among the Jews of Palestine against Greek modes of thought, manners, culture, even against the Greek language.

The second was the jealousy with which the Palestinian Jews regarded the Alexandrine Jews, their mode of interpreting Scripture, and their system of theology.

St. Paul, an accomplished Greek scholar, brought up at Tarsus amidst Hellenistic Jews, adopted the theology and exegesis in vogue at Alexandria, and on both these accounts excited the suspicion and dislike of the national party at Jerusalem. The Nazarenes were imbued with the prejudices they had acquired in their childhood, in the midst of which they had grown up, and they could not but regard Paul with alarm when he turned without disguise to the Greeks, and introduced into the Church the theological system and scriptural interpretations of a Jewish community they had always regarded as of questionable orthodoxy.

First let us consider the causes which contributed to the creation of the prejudice against the Hellenizers. Judaea had served as the battle-field of the Greek kings of Egypt and Syria. Whether Judaea fell under the dominion of Syria or Egypt it mattered not; Ptolemies and Seleucides alike were intolerable oppressors. But it was especially the latter who excited to its last exasperation the fanaticism of the Jews, and called forth in their breasts an ineffaceable antipathy towards everything that was Greek.

The temple was pillaged by them, the sanctuary was violated, the high-priesthood degraded. Antiochus Epiphanes entertained the audacious design of completely overthrowing the religion of the Jews, of forcibly Hellenizing them. For this purpose he forbade the celebration of the Sabbaths and feasts, drenched the sanctuary with blood to pollute it, the sacrifices were not permitted, circumcision was made illegal. The sufferings of the Jews, driven into deserts and remote hiding-places in the mountains, are described in the first book of the Maccabees.

Yet there was a party disposed to acquiesce in this attempt at changing the whole current of their nation's life, ready to undo the work of Ezra, break with their past, and fling themselves into the tide of Greek civilization and philosophic thought. These men set up a gymnasium in Jerusalem, Graecised their names, openly scoffed at the Law, ignored the Sabbath, and neglected circumcision.[1 - Joseph. Antiq. xii. 5; 1 Maccab. i. 11-15, 43, 52; 2 Maccab. iv. 9-16.] At the head of this party stood the high-priests Jason and Menelaus. The author of the first book of the Maccabees styles these conformists to the state policy, “evil men, seducing many to despise the Law.” Josephus designates them as “wicked” and “impious.”[2 - πονήροι, ἀσεβεῖς. – Antiq. xiii. 4, xii. 10.]

The memory of the miseries endured in the persecution of Antiochus did not fade out of the Jewish mind, neither did the party disappear which was disposed to symbolize with Greek culture, and was opposed to Jewish prejudice. Nor did the abhorrence in which it was held lose its intensity.

From the date of the Antiochian persecution, the names of “Greek” or “friend of the Greeks” were used as synonymous with “traitor” and “apostate.”

Seventy years before Christ, whilst Hyrcanus was besieging Aristobulus in Jerusalem, the besiegers furnished the besieged daily with lambs for the sacrifice. An old Jew, belonging to the anti-national party, warned Hyrcanus that as long as the city was supplied with animals for the altar, so long it would hold out. On the morrow, in place of a lamb, a pig was flung over the walls. The earth shuddered at the impiety, and the heads of the synagogue solemnly cursed from thenceforth whosoever of their nation should for the future teach the Greek tongue to his sons.[3 - Baba-Kama, fol. 82; Menachoth, fol. 64; Sota, fol. 49; San-Baba, fol. 90.] Whether this incident be true or not, it proves that a century after Antiochus Epiphanes the Jews entertained a hatred of that Greek culture which they regarded as a source of incredulity and impiety.

The son of Duma asked his uncle Israel if, after having learned the whole Law, he might not study the philosophy of the Greeks. “ ‘The Book of the Law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night.’ These are the words of God” (Josh. i. 8), said the old man; “find me an hour which is neither day nor night, and in that study your Greek philosophy.”[4 - Menachoth, fol. 99.]

Gamaliel, the teacher of St. Paul, was well versed in Greek literature; that this caused uneasiness in his day is probable; and indeed the Gemara labours to explain the fact of his knowledge of Greek, and apologizes for it.[5 - Baba-Kama, fol. 63.] Consequently Saul, the disciple of Gamaliel, also a Greek scholar, would be likely to incur the same suspicion, as one leaning away from strict Judaism towards Gentile culture.

The Jews of Palestine viewed the Alexandrine Jews with dislike, and mistrusted the translation into Greek of their sacred books. They said it was a day of sin and blasphemy when the version of the Septuagint was made, equal only in wickedness to that on which their fathers had made the golden calf.[6 - Mass. Sopherim, c. i. in Othonis Lexicon Rabbin. p. 329.]

The loudly-proclaimed intention of Paul to turn to the Gentiles, his attitude of hostility towards the Law, the abrogation of the Sabbath and substitution for it of the Lord's-day, his denunciation of circumcision, his abandonment of his Jewish name for a Gentile one, led to his being identified by the Jews of Palestine with the abhorred Hellenistic party; and the Nazarene Christians shared to the full in the national prejudices.

The Jews, at the time of the first spread of Christianity, were dispersed over the whole world; and in Greece and Asia Minor occupied a quarter, and exercised influence, in every town. The Seleucides had given the right of citizenship to these Asiatic Jews, and had extended to them some sort of protection. The close association of these Jews with Greeks necessarily led to the adoption of some of their ideas. Since Ezra, the dominant principle of the Palestinian and Babylonish rabbis had been to create a “hedge of the Law,” to constitute of the legal prescriptions a net lacing those over whom it was cast with minute yet tough fibres, stifling spontaneity. Whilst rabbinism was narrowing the Jewish horizon, Greek philosophy was widening man's range of vision. The tendencies of Jewish theology and Greek philosophy were radically opposed. The Alexandrine Jews never submitted to be involved in the meshes of rabbinism. They produced a school of thinkers, of whom Aristobulus was the first known exponent, and Philo the last expression, which sought to combine Mosaism with Platonism, to explain the Pentateuch as the foundation of a philosophic system closely related to the highest and best theories of the Greeks.

In the Holy Land, routine, the uniform repetition of prescribed forms, the absence of all alien currents of thought, tended insensibly to transform religion into formalism, and to identify it with the ceremonies which are its exterior manifestation.

In Egypt, on the other hand, the Alexandrine Jews, ambitious to give to the Greeks an exalted idea of their religion, strove to bring into prominence its great doctrines of the Unity of the Godhead, of Creation, and Providence. All secondary points were allegorized or slurred over. As Palestinian rabbinism became essentially ceremonial, Alexandrine Judaism became essentially spiritual. The streams of life and thought in these members of the same race were diametrically opposed.

The Jews settled in Asia Minor, subjected to the same influences, actuated by the same motives, as the Egyptian Jews, looked to Alexandria rather than to Jerusalem or Babylon for guidance, and were consequently involved in the same jealous dislike which fell on the Jews of Egypt.[7 - Philo is not mentioned by name once in the Talmud, nor has a single sentiment or interpretation of an Alexandrine Jew been admitted into the Jerusalem or Babylonish Talmud.]

There can be no doubt that St. Paul was acquainted with, and influenced by, the views of the Alexandrine school. That he had read some of Philo's works is more than probable. How much he drew from the writings of Aristobulus the Peripatetic cannot be told, as none of the books of that learned but eclectic Jew have been preserved.[8 - Aristobulus wrote a book to prove that the Greek sages drew their philosophy from Moses, and addressed his book to Ptolemy Philometor.]

In more than one point Paul departs from the traditional methods of the Palestinian rabbis, to adopt those of the Alexandrines. The Jews of Palestine did not admit the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Paul, on two occasions, follows the Hellenistic mode of allegorizing the sacred text. On one of these occasions he uses an allegory of Philo, while slightly varying its application.[9 - Gal. iv. 24, 25.]

The Palestinian Jews knew of no seven orders of angels; the classification of the celestial hierarchy was adopted by Paul[10 - Col. i. 16.] from Philo and his school. The identification of idols with demons[11 - 1 Cor. x. 21.] was also distinctively Alexandrine.

But what is far more remarkable is to find in Philo, born between thirty and forty years before Christ, the key to most of Paul's theology, – the doctrines of the all-sufficiency of faith, of the worthlessness of good works, of the imputation of righteousness, of grace, mediation, atonement.

But in Philo, these doctrines drift purposeless. Paul took them and applied them to Christ, and at once they fell into their ranks and places. What was in suspension in Philo, crystallized in Paul. What the Baptist was to the Judaean Jews, that Philo was to the Hellenistic Jews; his thoughts, his theories, were —

“In the flecker'd dawning

The glitterance of Christ.”[12 - Dante, Parad. xiv.]

The Fathers, perplexed at finding Pauline words, expressions, ideas, in the writings of Philo, and unwilling to admit that Paul had derived them from Philo, invented a myth that the Alexandrine Jew came to Rome and was there converted to the Christian faith. Chronology and a critical examination of the writings of the Jewish Plato have burst that bubble.[13 - See the question carefully discussed in M. F. Delaunay's Moines et Sibylles; Paris, 1874, pp. 28 sq.]

The fact that Paul was deeply saturated with the philosophy of the Alexandrine Jews has given rise also to two obstinate Christian legends, – that Dionysius the Areopagite, author of the Celestial Hierarchy, the Divine Names, &c., was the disciple of St. Paul, and that Seneca the philosopher was also his convert and pupil. Dionysius took Philo's system of the universe and emanations from the Godhead and Christianized them. The influence of Philo on the system of Dionysius saute aux yeux, as the French would say. And Dionysius protests, again and again, in his writings that he learned his doctrine from St. Paul.

From a very early age, the Fathers insisted on Seneca having been a convert of St. Paul; they pointed out the striking analogies in their writings, the similarity in their thoughts. How was this explicable unless one had been the pupil of the other? But Seneca, we know, lived some time in Alexandria with his uncle, Severus, prefect of Egypt; and at that time the young Roman, there can be little question, became acquainted with the writings of Philo.[14 - See, on this curious topic, C. Aubertin: Sénèque et St. Paul; Paris, 1872.]

Thus St. Paul, by adopting the mode of Biblical interpretation of a rival school to that dominant in Judaea, by absorbing its philosophy, applying it to the person of Christ and the moral governance of the Church, by associating with Asiatic Jews, known to be infected with Greek philosophic heresies, and by his open invocation to the Gentiles to come into and share in all the plenitude of the privileges of the gospel, incurred the suspicion, distrust, dislike of the believers in Jerusalem, who had grown up in the midst of national prejudices which Paul shocked.

3. It has been argued with much plausibility, that because certain of the primitive Fathers were unacquainted with the four Gospels now accounted Canonical, that therefore those Gospels are compositions subsequent to their date, and that therefore also their authority as testimonies to the acts and sayings of Jesus is sensibly weakened, if not wholly overthrown. It is true that there were certain Fathers of the first two centuries who were unacquainted with our Gospels, but the above conclusions drawn from this fact are unsound.

This treatise will, I hope, establish the fact that at the close of the first century almost every Church had its own Gospel, with which alone it was acquainted. But it does not follow that these Gospels were not as trustworthy, as genuine records, as the four which we now alone recognize.

It is possible, from what has been preserved of some of these lost Gospels, to form an estimate of their scope and character. We find that they bore a very close resemblance to the extant Synoptical Gospels, though they were by no means identical with them.

We find that they contained most of what exists in our three first Evangels, in exactly the same words; but that some were fuller, others less complete, than the accepted Synoptics.

If we discover whole paragraphs absolutely identical in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, of the Hebrews, of the Clementines, of the Lord, it goes far to prove that all the Evangelists drew upon a common fund. And if we see that, though using the same material, they arranged it differently, we are forced to the conclusion that this material they incorporated in their biographies existed in anecdota, not in a consecutive narrative.

Some, at least, of the Gospels were in existence at the close of the first century; but the documents of which they were composed were then old and accepted.

And though it is indisputable that in the second century the Four had not acquired that supremacy which brought about the disappearance of the other Gospels, and were therefore not quoted by the Fathers in preference to them, it is also certain that all the material out of which both the extant and the lost Synoptics were composed was then in existence, and was received in the Church as true and canonical.

Admitting fully the force of modern Biblical criticism, I cannot admit all its most sweeping conclusions, for they are often, I think, more sweeping than just.

The material out of which all the Synoptical Gospels, extant or, lost, were composed, was in existence and in circulation in the Churches in the first century. That material is – the sayings of Christ on various occasions, and the incidents in his life. These sayings and doings of the Lord, I see no reason to doubt, were written down from the mouths of apostles and eye-witnesses, in order that the teaching and example of Christ might be read to believers in every Church during the celebration of the Eucharist.

The early Church followed with remarkable fidelity the customs of the Essenes, so faithfully that, as I have shown, Josephus mistook the Nazarenes for members of the Essene sect; and in the third century Eusebius was convinced that the Therapeutae, their Egyptian counterparts, were actually primitive Christians.[15 - Euseb. Hist. Eccl. ii. 17. The Bishop of Caesarea is quoting from Philo's account of the Therapeutae, and argues that these Alexandrine Jews must have been Christians, because their manner of life, religious customs and doctrines, were identical with those of Christians. “Their meetings, the distinction of the sexes at these meetings, the religious exercises performed at them, are still in vogue among us at the present day, and, especially at the commemoration of the Saviour's passion, we, like them, pass the time in fasting and vigil, and in the study of the divine word. All these the above-named author (Philo) has accurately described in his writings, and are the same customs that are observed by us alone, at the present day, particularly the vigils of the great Feast, and the exercises in them, and the hymns that are commonly recited among us. He states that, whilst one sings gracefully with a certain measure, the others, listening in silence, join in at the final clauses of the hymns; also that, on the above-named days, they lie on straw spread on the ground, and, to use his own words, abstain altogether from wine and from flesh. Water is their only drink, and the relish of their bread salt and hyssop. Besides this, he describes the grades of dignity among those who administer the ecclesiastical functions committed to them, those of deacons, and the presidencies of the episcopate as the highest. Therefore,” Eusebius concludes, “it is obvious to all that Philo, when he wrote these statements, had in view the first heralds of the gospel, and the original practices handed down from the apostles.”]

The Essenes assembled on the Sabbath for a solemn feast, in white robes, and, with faces turned to the East, sang antiphonal hymns, broke bread and drank together of the cup of love. During this solemn celebration the president read portions from the sacred Scriptures, and the exhortations of the elders. At the Christian Eucharist the ceremonial was identical;[16 - It is deserving of remark that the turning to the East for prayer, common to the Essenes and primitive Christians, was forbidden by the Mosaic Law and denounced by prophets. When the Essenes diverged from the Law, the Christians followed their lead.] Pliny's description of a Christian assembly might be a paragraph from Josephus or Philo describing an Essene or Therapeutic celebration. In place of the record of the wanderings of the Israelites and the wars of their kings being read at their conventions, the president read the journeys of the Lord, his discourses and miracles.

No sooner was a Church founded by an apostle than there rose a demand for this sort of instruction, and it was supplied by the jottings-down of reminiscences of the Lord and his teaching, orally given by those who had companied with him.

Thus there sprang into existence an abundant crop of memorials of the Lord, surrounded by every possible guarantee of their truth. And these fragmentary records passed from one Church to another. The pious zeal of an Antiochian community furnished with the memorials of Peter would borrow of Jerusalem the memorials of James and Matthew. One of the traditions of John found its way into the Hebrew Gospel – that of the visit of Nicodemus; but it never came into the possession of the compiler of the first Gospel or of St. Luke.

After a while, each Church set to work to string the anecdota it possessed into a consecutive story, and thus the Synoptical Gospels came into being.

Of these, some were more complete than others, some were composed of more unique material than the others.

The second Gospel, if we may trust Papias, and I see no reason for doubting his testimony, is the composition of Mark, the disciple of St. Peter, and consists exclusively of the recollections of St. Peter. This Gospel was not co-ordinated probably till late, till long after the disjointed memorabilia were in circulation. It first circulated in Egypt; but in at least one of the Petrine Churches – that of Rhossus – the recollections of St. Peter had already been arranged in a consecutive memoir, and, in A.D. 190, Serapion, Bishop of Antioch, found the Church of Rhossus holding exclusively to this book as a Gospel of traditional authority, received from the prince of the apostles.

The Gospel of St. Matthew, on the other hand, is a diatessaron composed of four independent collections of memorabilia. Its groundwork is a book by Matthew the apostle, a collection of the discourses of the Lord. Whether Matthew wrote also a collection of the acts of the Lord, or contributed disconnected anecdotes of the Lord to Churches of his founding, and these were woven in with his work on the Lord's discourses, is possible, but is conjectural only.

But what is clear is, that into the first Gospel was incorporated much, not all, of the material used by Mark for the construction of his Gospel, viz. the recollections of St. Peter. That the first evangelist did not merely amplify the Mark Gospel appears from his arranging the order of his anecdotes differently; that he did use the same “anecdota” is evidenced by the fact of his using them often word for word.

The Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel quoted in the Clementines were composed in precisely the same manner, and of the same materials, but not of all the same.